Friday, December 08, 2017

Anti-Echo

I’m not here to be Tin Foil Hat Man and convince you that companies
like Amazon are spying on your every move and compiling data sets based
on your activity so that they can more effectively serve you ads or sell
you products. I am here to say that smart speakers like the Echo do
contain microphones that are always on, and every time you say something
to the speaker, it sends data back to the server farm... For now, the companies that
sell smart speakers say that those microphones only send recordings to
the servers when you use the wake word. The same companies are less
explicit about what they’re doing with all that data. They’re also vague
about whether they might share voice recordings with developers in the
future. Amazon, at least, seems open to the idea.

We
do know that Amazon will hand over your Echo data if the gadget becomes
involved in a homicide investigation. That very thing happened earlier this year,
and while Amazon had previously refused to hand over customer data, the
company didn’t argue with a subpoena in a murder case. It remains
unclear how government agencies like the FBI, CIA, and NSA are treating
smart speakers, too. The FBI, for one, would neither confirm nor deny wiretapping Amazon Echo devices when Gizmodo asked the agency about it last year.

Sinister
ambitions of governments and multinational corporations aside, you
should also worry about the threat of bugs and hackers going after smart
speakers.